It’s officially Labor Day weekend. Next week, many will say farewell to summer and hello to September. A month after that, it will be the first of October and the autumnal vibes will be in high gear. And at that point, there will be only a few weeks until Halloween.
Put another way: It’s basically Halloween. And in furtherance of the pop-culturization of the holiday, Target has kicked off the season with a Stanley tumbler-inspired costume for all ages, a nod to the social-media-famous reusable drinking cup that will undeniably go down as one of the “it” water bottles of our times.
According to the Target website, the “Tumbley Cup” costume features a collapsible blue vinyl body with metallic-colored trim and logo, an attached handle and straw, and holes for the wearer’s hands. The costume, which is said to fit most adults and children ages 8 and up, is being sold for $35.
This latest zeitgeisty offering, which the retailer started selling last month, is further evidence of the shift in how people have come to celebrate Halloween in recent years. No longer focusing just on ghosts, witches and other classic avatars of spookiness, the holiday — especially as it exists online — can feel as if it’s less about kids trick-or-treating, and more about adults taking cues from social media to create ironic and clever costumes to share on their timelines.
In a 2022 article in The Atlantic, the writer Faith Hill argued that what makes the holiday so appealing to adults is that it’s an opportunity to stop taking themselves so seriously and have more pointless fun: “When everyone is wearing a dumb outfit and surrounded by tacky decorations, you all withhold judgment together,” she wrote.
And the merriment continues to manifest online. Many millennials have described buying Halloween items for the express purpose of including them in social media posts.
Will the internet see costumes in bright “Brat” green this year? Almost certainly. Someone might also find a way to imagine a “Hawk Tuah Girl” costume, inspired by the viral onomatopoeia catchphrase. And when it comes to being “very demure, very mindful,” the possibilities are endless.
The Target tumbler cup costume origin is listed simply as “imported” and the garment is made of 100 percent polyester, which doesn’t inspire much confidence in its quality. One reviewer on the company’s website described the item as “cute but cheap looking” because of the materials used and how it is packaged, which made it “extremely crinkly.”
“I have not yet figured out how to make it look more like the photo,” the customer wrote online this week. “The ‘straw’ piece is bent out of shape so bad I can’t get it to stand up right, and the white rim of the top of the cup is crinkled and will not hold its form.”
Although the costume might not have the same durability as the popular stainless steel cups, it might just be a hit among the millions of consumers who are sporting the best-selling drinking vessel across the country.
Target’s version not the first Stanley Cup-inspired costume. A content creator on TikTok constructed a similar look in 2022 using large trash bins painted pink and other materials to construct the straw and the handle. Her video highlighting the creation was also shared by the Stanley brand. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
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